Speaker 1: Hey there, it's your host ed helms.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted
Speaker 1: to remind you that my brand new book is coming
Speaker 1: out on April twenty ninth. It's called Snaffo, The Definitive
Speaker 1: Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups, and you can pre
Speaker 1: order it right now at snafudashbook dot com. Trust me,
Speaker 1: if you like this show, you're gonna love this book.
Speaker 1: It's got all the wild disasters spectacular face plants we
Speaker 1: just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker.
Speaker 1: I am also going on tour to celebrate. That's right.
Speaker 1: I'm coming to New York, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago,
Speaker 1: San Francisco, and my hometown Los Angeles. So if you've
Speaker 1: ever wanted to see me stumble through a live Q
Speaker 1: and A or dramatically read about a kiddie cat getting
Speaker 1: turned into a CIA operative, now's your chance again. Head
Speaker 1: to snafoo dashbook dot com to pre order the book
Speaker 1: and check out all the tour details and day, or
Speaker 1: just click the link in the show notes. That'll work too. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's it, on with the chaos. This is Snafu Season
Speaker 1: three formula six. November thirtieth, nineteen twenty eight, Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 1: The city has just opened a new music hall downtown.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen twenties opulence from top to bottom, arched ceilings
Speaker 1: in an Italian style, columns and balconies glowing with gold leaf,
Speaker 1: a giant plaster eagle looking down over the stage. Maybe
Speaker 1: not how I would do the decor, more into tasteful
Speaker 1: minimalism myself, but the folks in Cleveland are eating it up.
Speaker 1: A massive sparkling chandelier spills light over a crowd of
Speaker 1: thousands who are all losing their minds hearing for the
Speaker 1: Paul Whiteman Orchestra playing their hits. They're the most popular
Speaker 1: band in America, and they have a talented young coronetist
Speaker 1: blowing sweet notes from his that's Bis bider Beck on
Speaker 1: the coronet. How many folks named Bix nowadays? I'd say,
Speaker 1: you know you're in the twenties, baby. He's standing in
Speaker 1: the back row of the band doing his thing. Bix
Speaker 1: is a small, dapper fella, dressed in a tux with
Speaker 1: slicked brown hair parted down the middle like an open
Speaker 1: Faulkner novel. A few songs into the performance, something strange happens.
Speaker 1: Bix's eyes rolled back, He slumps over on the stage
Speaker 1: and falls to the ground completely unconscious. A band mate
Speaker 1: jolts him awake, helps him backstage, and eventually he takes
Speaker 1: him back to his hotel room. That night, Bix has
Speaker 1: a freak out in his hotel room. He yells hysterically,
Speaker 1: he destroys furniture. This surprised everyone who knew him. He
Speaker 1: was a jazz musician, I a member of led Zeppelin.
Speaker 1: His bandmates would later describe it as a fit of delirium.
Speaker 1: They said he cracked.
Speaker 3: Up Yon Jo or Yon.
Speaker 4: True.
Speaker 5: Just a little song Keep Georgia on my Mind.
Speaker 1: Georgia on My Mind, That Little Diddy is the American
Speaker 1: songbook classic Georgia on My Mind. Maybe you know the
Speaker 1: iconic Ray Charles version, but this is an original recording
Speaker 1: with the composer Hogy Carmichael from the last recording session
Speaker 1: of Bix's career. In his solo, you can still hear
Speaker 1: Bix's genius, and though you might not be able to tell,
Speaker 1: Bis reportedly didn't have enough breath to finish some of
Speaker 1: the gorgeous phrases in his solo Towards the end of
Speaker 1: the song, Bix is struggling. He never really recovers. A
Speaker 1: year later, Bis is home in his queen's New York apartment.
Speaker 1: By now, he's bedridden, down to just one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty pounds, complaining of constant headaches, dizziness, memory loss, and blackouts.
Speaker 1: This summer night, a neighbor visits and finds Bix in
Speaker 1: bed under the sheets, hallucinating. Bix dies that night. He
Speaker 1: was just twenty eight. What happened to him? That question
Speaker 1: haunted Bix's family and his fans. Sure they knew Bix
Speaker 1: wasn't well, and they knew that, like a lot of
Speaker 1: touring musicians, Bicks was a heavy drinker. That had been
Speaker 1: true since his teens, But it would take years for
Speaker 1: anyone to see how this all fit into a larger story.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen twenties, taking a drink put Bix, along
Speaker 1: with me millions of Americans, right in the middle of
Speaker 1: the decade's bitter divide over alcohol. In the end, the
Speaker 1: war between the wets and the dryes would have a
Speaker 1: massive human cost. I'm ed Helms and This is Snaffo,
Speaker 1: a show about history's greatest screw ups. Last season, we
Speaker 1: told the story of the burglary that exposed Jay Edgar
Speaker 1: Hoover's secret FBI. This season, we go back a little
Speaker 1: further in time, all the way to the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1: We're bringing you a dark tale from the heart of
Speaker 1: the Prohibition era. As we all know, Prohibition did not work.
Speaker 1: It was what you might call a snaffoo. Within that
Speaker 1: snaffo is another snaffhoo, one you probably haven't heard about.
Speaker 1: How a lot of Americans started dying mysteriously and the
Speaker 1: unlikely duo who tried to figure out why and save them.
Speaker 1: On this season of Snaffo, the story of Formulas. How
Speaker 1: prohibitions wore on alcohol went so off the rails the
Speaker 1: government wound up poisoning its own people. I thought I
Speaker 1: had a pretty good handle on prohibition. The nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: the era before the Great Depression, when we felt like, hey,
Speaker 1: world War One is over, what better to do than party?
Speaker 1: The Harlem Renaissance, jazz votes for women. America was feeling
Speaker 1: a burst of new energy. We were trying out cars,
Speaker 1: trying out radio. Heck, we were trying out movies. And
Speaker 1: as a Georgia boy, I can't help loving how much
Speaker 1: love Georgia was getting in that decade. In addition to
Speaker 1: Georgia on my mind, another classic emerged, Sweet Georgia Brown.
Speaker 1: And the background to all of that was, of course, Prohibition.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of part of our mental furniture. Right.
Speaker 1: For me, the word Prohibition takes me back to all
Speaker 1: the great portrayals in classic American cinema, like The Untouchables,
Speaker 1: two straight hours of mafia set pieces. Who could forget
Speaker 1: when elliot Ness faces down Al Capone in a hotel lobby?
Speaker 1: Come on, you can't discern up a pitch? Do you
Speaker 1: talk to me like that in front of my son?
Speaker 1: If you didn't sneak out to hear de Niro drop
Speaker 1: f bombs in an Italian accent, were you even thirteen?
Speaker 1: The summer the Untouchables came out. I mean, just listen
Speaker 1: to that, macho chest thumping cops and mobsters, good guys
Speaker 1: and bad guys going toe to toe. It's classic Hollywood
Speaker 1: stuff that just reels you in. But then, well, I
Speaker 1: heard the story of a Prohibition snafo that genuinely surprised
Speaker 1: me because it wasn't part of the Prohibition story that
Speaker 1: I knew. It was the story of Formula six and
Speaker 1: a devastating Prohibition era program by the federal government. Hey, honey,
Speaker 1: have you ever heard of Formula six?
Speaker 4: Now?
Speaker 1: Yeah, almost no one had. So I called up someone
Speaker 1: who really brought Prohibition into focus for me, along with
Speaker 1: millions of TV fans like me. Hey, so good to
Speaker 1: meet you, man, it's so so great to meet you.
Speaker 1: That's Terence Winter, creator of the epic TV series Boardwalk Empire.
Speaker 1: I put the question to him, I'm curious if you're
Speaker 1: if you hit on in your research, are you familiar
Speaker 1: with Formula six? I am not, And that was wild
Speaker 1: to me because his show is stacked with the kinds
Speaker 1: of details that made nineteen twenties Atlantic City come to life.
Speaker 5: Even though it's one hundred years ago, it's still felt modern.
Speaker 5: People dressed in suits, they went out to restaurants, they
Speaker 5: talked on telephone, they drove in cars.
Speaker 1: You know, it's still felt cool. It still felt like excessive.
Speaker 5: Well this was modern. You know you could wear some
Speaker 5: of those clothes today.
Speaker 1: I mean, I gotta say, I do look pretty good
Speaker 1: in a pair of spats. But the sense we have
Speaker 1: that we already know prohibition, it can actually lead us astray.
Speaker 1: A little, because cliches about life in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: are so thick, we assume we know what it's all about.
Speaker 1: You know, liquor was made illegal. It was a big mistake.
Speaker 1: There was a bunch of mobsters and Tommy guns, and
Speaker 1: then it got repealed. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, every time you ever see anything in the twenties,
Speaker 5: everybody's doing the fucking Charleston. I was like, did they
Speaker 5: do any other songs written between nineteen twenty and nineteen thirty?
Speaker 1: Obviously, yes, I mean we're talking about the birth of jazz.
Speaker 1: We're talking about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Eddie Lang Earl Hines.
Speaker 1: I could go on. The point is we tend to
Speaker 1: paint history with broad brushes, like Terry says, when we
Speaker 1: think about the Prohibition era, our minds probably go immediately
Speaker 1: to the cliches we know best, and the real complex
Speaker 1: human lives that ordinary people lived in the past don't
Speaker 1: always come through when we talk about history. But this story,
Speaker 1: the story of Formula six, reveals something bizarre that was
Speaker 1: happening all along. Underneath all the organized crime and speak
Speaker 1: easy gin and temperance moralizing, a shocking government plot rooted
Speaker 1: in the first modern American culture war. It starts with
Speaker 1: a pair of scientists, investigators who happened to see it coming.
Speaker 1: In fact, they tried to stop it. It's nineteen eighteen
Speaker 1: in New York and the city is facing a problem. Okay,
Speaker 1: the city is facing a lot of problems, but here's
Speaker 1: a tricky one. A record number of murders are going unsolved.
Speaker 1: A city report lays blamed squarely on one government office,
Speaker 1: in particular, the office of the coroner. The coroner was
Speaker 1: essentially the city's chief death investigator. He issued death certificates
Speaker 1: and performed autopsies for all murders, suicides, and accidental debts.
Speaker 1: A pretty grim but important job, and yet the city's
Speaker 1: coroners were either horribly unqualified or terribly corrupt, or quite
Speaker 1: often both.
Speaker 4: They made coroners out of anyone who needed a job,
Speaker 4: who the party machine owed them a favor.
Speaker 1: That's Deborah Blum, author of the Poisoner's Handbook, Murder and
Speaker 1: the Birth of Forensic Medicine. In jazz Age, New York.
Speaker 1: She describes how at the time, the police essentially used
Speaker 1: coroners to rubber stamp false reports and sometimes even cover
Speaker 1: up murders. And when she says anyone could become a coroner,
Speaker 1: she means it.
Speaker 4: There were sign painters that were milkmen. There were funeral
Speaker 4: home operators, there were lawyers, and there were notably doctors
Speaker 4: who were such terrible doctors that they had lost their practices.
Speaker 1: And if you think that's bad, let me introduce you
Speaker 1: to the head corner of New York in nineteen eighteen,
Speaker 1: a guy who showed up to crime scenes completely hammered.
Speaker 4: There are death certificates that literally say could be diabetes
Speaker 4: or possibly an auto accident. Right, I mean, you're just
Speaker 4: going seriously.
Speaker 1: After stories like that started coming to light, the mayor
Speaker 1: had no choice but to make some changes. It was
Speaker 1: time to find someone who could get to the bottom
Speaker 1: of all these crimes, someone who is less Homer Simpson
Speaker 1: and more Sherlock Holmes or I don't know, maybe anyone
Speaker 1: who could stand upright. City officials decided the coroner's office
Speaker 1: was a joke, an embarrassment, and a waste of taxpayers money,
Speaker 1: so they shut it down. But they couldn't just ignore
Speaker 1: the reasons people died in New York. They had to
Speaker 1: replace it with something. Their idea, a new system for
Speaker 1: the city and a new position that would be filled
Speaker 1: by a qualified doctor who would appoint a trained staff
Speaker 1: to examine cases and rule on causes of death. This
Speaker 1: new lead position was chief Medical Examiner of New York City.
Speaker 1: So they announced the job opening and in walk de
Speaker 1: fella named Charles Norris. H no love Walker Texas ranger
Speaker 1: Chuck Norris, and god knows, I'm scared of him. But
Speaker 1: just to be clear, this is doctor Charles Norris of
Speaker 1: New York, New York.
Speaker 4: He was a really big guy and he had one
Speaker 4: of those kind of classic spade like beards. He had
Speaker 4: a big booming voice and a a Yale football player's presence,
Speaker 4: and he used it when he needed to.
Speaker 1: That's right. This particular Norris was a yalely with the
Speaker 1: appropriate aristocratic roots.
Speaker 4: He was a descendant of the Norrises who founded Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 4: So they were a long time, well established, important American family.
Speaker 1: Which means that yep, Norris was rich rich. He didn't
Speaker 1: hide it. Norris was a public servant who rode around
Speaker 1: like Bruce Wayne.
Speaker 4: He never went anywhere without his being driven by his chauffeur.
Speaker 4: And even when he went to crime scenes, you know,
Speaker 4: his chauffeur would take him to the crime scene and
Speaker 4: he would get out in his Kashmir coat and his
Speaker 4: expensive hat.
Speaker 1: Not exactly a man of the people, you'd think, but
Speaker 1: money bags aside. It turns out public service actually ran
Speaker 1: deep in Norris's blood. Norris's ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War.
Speaker 1: Ever heard of it. They stripped lead gutters and rain
Speaker 1: spouts from their house to make bullets for the Continental Army. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the house is flooding again. Smoking chair will be ruined.
Speaker 6: My beloved.
Speaker 4: It is the sacrifice we make to bring forth a
Speaker 4: new nation.
Speaker 1: And then in the Civil War, Norris's grandfather negotiated the
Speaker 1: first one hundred million dollar loan financing the Union government's
Speaker 1: war against the Confederates.
Speaker 3: All of the all of the.
Speaker 1: Norris took the do gooder spirit of his ancestors and
Speaker 1: studied medicine, became a doctor, And now as the Great
Speaker 1: War raged in Europe, he was looking to do his
Speaker 1: part to keep the people of New York safe. So
Speaker 1: he made a real run at the position of Chief
Speaker 1: Medical Examiner when the job opened up, an actually qualified
Speaker 1: doctor who wanted to use his position for the public good. Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out that even for someone who wanted to
Speaker 1: do good, even after he started his job as chief
Speaker 1: medical Examiner, the odds were stacked against him because it
Speaker 1: turns out there were plenty of officials who simply liked
Speaker 1: the old way of doing things. Norris's budget for his
Speaker 1: staff and his workspace was laughably small that drunk corner
Speaker 1: had left him in office literally in shambles.
Speaker 4: At one point, he was actually forced to buy the
Speaker 4: clocks on the walls of the Medical Examiner's office because
Speaker 4: the mayor the budget is such an agree that they
Speaker 4: couldn't even afford clock.
Speaker 1: Before, police officers used corners to play their political games,
Speaker 1: but now with Norris in charge, they were in for
Speaker 1: a surprise. Like when a few officers brought Norris a
Speaker 1: body to examine, which happened to be riddled with bullet holes.
Speaker 1: They asked for a simple John Hancock on a let's say,
Speaker 1: pre filled out death certificate that said the cause of
Speaker 1: death was suicide. Norris looked at the corpse and said
Speaker 1: that I don't think.
Speaker 2: So out of the question, in my opinion, to even
Speaker 2: consider the possibility of a suicide on account of the
Speaker 2: number and situation of.
Speaker 1: The bullet wounds.
Speaker 2: There were four bullet wounds spray across the corpse.
Speaker 1: In other words, seems impossible that this poor guy shot
Speaker 1: himself in the heart, shoulder, leg, and arm. Norris was
Speaker 1: serious about his work. He was serious about building the
Speaker 1: Office of the Chief Medical Examiner into an effective research
Speaker 1: team that could get to the bottom of all the
Speaker 1: deaths in New York City. But to do that he
Speaker 1: needed help. Norris was a doctor, not a chemist, who
Speaker 1: could detect toxins or poisons in a dead body. And
Speaker 1: during this time, there were more and more poisons surrounding Americans.
Speaker 1: Morphine and teething, medicines for infants, opium and sedatives, arsenic
Speaker 1: and everything from cosmetics to pesticides. And don't even ask
Speaker 1: about how much formaldehyde they were mixing with cowbrains and
Speaker 1: putting in milk. And I thought that micro plastics and
Speaker 1: my water bottle were bad. And it's not like it
Speaker 1: was harmless. People were dying from this stuff so often,
Speaker 1: in fact, that it was hard to keep up. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing about poisons. They're just not quite as
Speaker 1: obvious as bullet holes. And so Norris had a crazy
Speaker 1: idea to create a dedicated lab where chemists could work
Speaker 1: on determining causes of death. Call it a toxicology lab.
Speaker 1: At the time, no other city in America had one,
Speaker 1: and you know Norris and his cashmere, he always had
Speaker 1: to have the best. This lab would be installed at Bellevue,
Speaker 1: a New York hospital perched along the East River since
Speaker 1: eighteen eleven.
Speaker 4: As he thinks about organizing his department, the first thing
Speaker 4: he thinks is, we need a chemist.
Speaker 1: Norris just needed to pick the right brainiac for the job.
Speaker 1: Fortunately for him, there was someone who fit the bill
Speaker 1: right down the hall, an assistant professor at the Bellevue
Speaker 1: Medical College, and the award for Forensic Toxicologist for the
Speaker 1: newly established New York Office of Chief Medical Examiner, where
Speaker 1: the clocks don't even work, goes to doctor Alexander Gettler.
Speaker 1: Come on down, alex you're the lucky winner, uh, Doctor Getler,
Speaker 1: Doctor Geedler. Well, when Norris approached him, this Alexander Gettler
Speaker 1: fellow wasn't convinced that playing robin to Norris's batman was
Speaker 1: his dream job. You see, Alexander Getler was already in
Speaker 1: a position that was nothing to sneeze at in those days,
Speaker 1: and well, if you looked at where the invitation was
Speaker 1: coming from, Let's just say it was pretty clear. The
Speaker 1: Medical Examiner's office was in the build the plane as
Speaker 1: you fly stage of its existence. Not to mention, Getler
Speaker 1: was from a completely different world. He was quite different
Speaker 1: from Flash the cash Norris.
Speaker 3: He was trim, yeah, dark hair, he had a long
Speaker 3: angular face, chomping on a cigar all the time.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, that's Dorothy Atsel, Alexander Gettler's granddaughter.
Speaker 6: Every picture we have of him, he's in a suit.
Speaker 1: And that's Vicky Atsel, Alexander's great granddaughter.
Speaker 6: He's got like a pretty serious expression, which I think
Speaker 6: was kind of his m He was a pretty serious guy.
Speaker 6: He just kind of like went to work as anyone
Speaker 6: would go to work with his suit jacket on.
Speaker 3: He wasn't from wealth or Ivy League education or anything
Speaker 3: like that. He just kind of pulled himself up and
Speaker 3: followed what he wanted to do, got the education he needed,
Speaker 3: worked nights so he could go to school during the day.
Speaker 7: Tickets, please all right, have a nice day.
Speaker 1: Gettler worked as a ticket taker for the thirty ninth
Speaker 1: Street Brooklyn to Battery Ferry and took the overnight shift.
Speaker 1: During the day, he earned himself a PhD in biochemistry
Speaker 1: at Columbia. Those brains and you know, fairly intense work
Speaker 1: ethic got Gettler his teaching job. He had put in
Speaker 1: the hard yards and he had earned it. But outside
Speaker 1: of work, he lived like a lot of other people
Speaker 1: in his Brooklyn neighborhood, tucked snugly in a brownstone with
Speaker 1: his wife's son and more than a half dozen Irish
Speaker 1: in laws.
Speaker 4: He raised his kids in the middle of this kind
Speaker 4: of chaos of the Irish American life in Brooklyn. I
Speaker 4: think that hugely influenced also his sense of the world
Speaker 4: because he was so connected to her family.
Speaker 1: But going back and forth between a busy home and
Speaker 1: a busy hospital, he saw the difference medicine could make
Speaker 1: in the lives of everyday people. So even though he
Speaker 1: had turned down Norris's offer, he couldn't put it out
Speaker 1: of his mind. Maybe if he joined the Medical Examiner's
Speaker 1: office he could do some good. So when Norris came
Speaker 1: around again, Getler was ready to consider the job. But
Speaker 1: Norris was also completely honest with Getler. This was nothing
Speaker 1: like a cushy job in academia. Gettler would have have
Speaker 1: to design the lab from scratch. You would have to
Speaker 1: figure out for himself how to do the work of
Speaker 1: detecting poisons. There were no training programs in forensic toxicology.
Speaker 1: He would have to blaze his own trail. That was
Speaker 1: all right, though, because Gentler loved nothing more than a
Speaker 1: challenge and cramming more chemistry work into his days. He
Speaker 1: agreed to take the position, but only if he could
Speaker 1: keep teaching at the medical College. That's how much he
Speaker 1: believed in his grind. Norris looked around at the backlog
Speaker 1: of bodies stacking up in Bellevue and said, sure, man,
Speaker 1: whatever you want.
Speaker 3: My grandfather was tapped to be the chief toxicologist. It
Speaker 3: just felt almost like they were like superhero crusaders as well,
Speaker 3: you know, like starting something and actually not just starting it,
Speaker 3: but turning the page on a system that didn't work,
Speaker 3: wasn't fair and was corrupt.
Speaker 6: It's funny what you said, I was gonna say, you said,
Speaker 6: mom about them being like superheroes that have just like
Speaker 6: it feels like it was. They're like like a Buddy
Speaker 6: cop movie of like these two scientists in the trenches together.
Speaker 1: And while the scientific trenches of New York may have
Speaker 1: been metaphorical, there's no question that our dynamic duo had
Speaker 1: a very real fight on their hands, because it turned
Speaker 1: out that even though the city was moving on from
Speaker 1: the flu epidemic and the war in France was winding down,
Speaker 1: a different kind of war was just getting started, and
Speaker 1: Norris and Gettler had gotten together just in time for
Speaker 1: the shit to hit the fan.
Speaker 3: It's been in the big baggie, in the box, in
Speaker 3: a closet, and if you look at each of the pages,
Speaker 3: they were all like sort of frayed and chipping.
Speaker 1: Dorothy Atsel is at at her kitchen table.
Speaker 3: I'm hesitating separating the pages, yeah, because every time I
Speaker 3: open it there's pieces of paper that just kind of
Speaker 3: flake off.
Speaker 1: She's meeting with one of our writers, Albert Chen. She's
Speaker 1: very very carefully handling a dusty blue, hard bound book
Speaker 1: that's older than my mom's wedding China. The book is
Speaker 1: a collection of typed reports written by Alexander Getler over
Speaker 1: the course of three decades.
Speaker 3: His dissertation was the balance of acid forming and base
Speaker 3: forming elements in food and its relation to ammonia metabolism.
Speaker 3: I don't know what that means.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been a while since tenth grade chemistry for
Speaker 1: me too.
Speaker 3: And then like this one, which was from nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 3: a method for the determination of death by drowning. So
Speaker 3: now I understand.
Speaker 7: What this is about.
Speaker 3: It's easy to understand. Back in the day when he
Speaker 3: was doing all of his work, they were pulling bodies
Speaker 3: out of the and you, how do you know if
Speaker 3: they drowned or they died by another means?
Speaker 1: Yeah, a great question that before Getler and Norris came along,
Speaker 1: no one had any clue how to answer. But Dorothy's daughter,
Speaker 1: Vicky says Getler figured it out.
Speaker 6: People would come to him with problems that they like
Speaker 6: didn't even really know the cause of. Just like all
Speaker 6: of these people who work in the same place are
Speaker 6: having the same issue. They're all getting weird tumors and cancer,
Speaker 6: transit workers or subway workers who were all feeling really
Speaker 6: like sluggish and like cognitively fuzzy. And he would first
Speaker 6: figure out like the cause of the problem and then
Speaker 6: solve it.
Speaker 1: That blue book contained all the detective work that Gettler
Speaker 1: and Norris pursued in their day, and that work kept
Speaker 1: them busy, very busy.
Speaker 3: They were so like focused on their work and they're
Speaker 3: trying to do things. They didn't want to leave the
Speaker 3: lab to use the bathroom, so they just urinated in
Speaker 3: the big sink they had in the lab, which I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I guess if you're really focused on your work and
Speaker 3: you really don't want to take the time, I get it.
Speaker 1: But despite what you may be thinking, the apparent lack
Speaker 1: of nearby urinals was not the biggest public health crisis
Speaker 1: Norris and Gettler were facing. By early nineteen nineteen, the
Speaker 1: deadly wave of influenza was finally passing, but Norris and Gettler,
Speaker 1: we're seeing a concerning uptick in victims reporting similar symptoms,
Speaker 1: a sudden sense of weakness, severe abdominal pain and vomiting, blindness,
Speaker 1: a slip into unconsciousness, heart failure, and even death. But why.
Speaker 1: They had a hunch it had something to do with
Speaker 1: a ubiquitous substance floating through the streets of New York
Speaker 1: City in nineteen nineteen. And no, I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: all the urine flowing from Gettler and Norris's big laboratory sink.
Speaker 1: We're talking about liquor. Alcohol is everywhere.
Speaker 8: The term that New York never sleeps is true of
Speaker 8: the nineteen twenties, like there are nightclubs on every single corner.
Speaker 1: That's Leshawn Harris, historian of New York City's underground economy.
Speaker 1: Even in black and Tan clubs.
Speaker 8: Inter racial clubs in New York City in the early
Speaker 8: twentieth century, African Americans are going to these clubs, both
Speaker 8: middle class and working class people and are drinking. Alcohol
Speaker 8: is something that black churches use for various different ceremonies.
Speaker 8: We also know that alcohol is something that different social
Speaker 8: groups are engaging and whether they be light beer or
Speaker 8: cocktails or a little bit of rum, it's something that
Speaker 8: one can engage in while at church. It's a part
Speaker 8: of your social life.
Speaker 1: Light beer, cocktails, a little bit of rum. Not if
Speaker 1: you were part of the Anti Saloon League. Let me
Speaker 1: tell you about these folks. Their mission state wasn't exactly
Speaker 1: hard to get at. It's kind of right there in
Speaker 1: the name anti Saloon. They wanted to hammer the bung
Speaker 1: back into America's whiskey barrel. To them, drinking was a
Speaker 1: moral outrage, a sin, and the root of all society's ills.
Speaker 1: From small beginnings, they grew into the most powerful lobbying
Speaker 1: group in America. In Ohio, where they started, they ran
Speaker 1: a pressure campaign that beat a popular governor. Ohio was dry,
Speaker 1: but why stop there? They got ambitious. They wanted to
Speaker 1: ring every last drop of liquor out of the whole
Speaker 1: wet nation. So as their next target, they set their
Speaker 1: sights on Gettler and Norris's stomping grounds, New York City.
Speaker 1: You see, by their account, New Yorkers drank a dozen
Speaker 1: pints of alcoholic beverages a week for every man, woman,
Speaker 1: and child, a per capita consumption that was more than
Speaker 1: three times the national average. One saloon for every six
Speaker 1: people in New York, the League said, as doctor Harris says,
Speaker 1: New York City at the end of World War One
Speaker 1: was bursting with working class saloons, chandeliered hotel bars, and
Speaker 1: wine soaked bohemian cafes. The Anti Saloon League called it
Speaker 1: the liquor Center of America. To them, the Big Apple
Speaker 1: had fermented into a sidery slush of drunkards and degenerates.
Speaker 1: They had the nation, and especially the nation's politicians, running scared,
Speaker 1: and then came World War One. It was exactly what
Speaker 1: they'd been waiting for. The Anti Saloon League saw the
Speaker 1: chance to justify a national ban on liquor as a
Speaker 1: wartime measure. That was easy. No politician wanted to be unpatriotic.
Speaker 1: But the wartime measure was just the first step. What
Speaker 1: they really wanted a permanent ban on liquor enshrined in
Speaker 1: the US Constitution. The US House of Representatives has voted
Speaker 1: in favor of the proposed eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
Speaker 1: which prohibits the petra sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors.
Speaker 5: The amendment will now make.
Speaker 8: Its way for the fifty states.
Speaker 6: January seventh, nineteen eighteen, Mississippi.
Speaker 3: Becomes the first state to ratify the eighteenth Amendment.
Speaker 7: Georgia becomes the thirteenth state to ratify the eighteenth Amendment.
Speaker 1: One by one, lawmakers and state houses across the country
Speaker 1: fell in line California as the twenty second state to
Speaker 1: ratify the eighteenth Amendment, But New York City was, as
Speaker 1: one paper called it, Satan's last stronghold.
Speaker 2: An apple did the trick in the garden of Eden.
Speaker 2: Imagine what I can do with the big apple in America.
Speaker 1: The Anti Saloon League, they were a lot of lawyers
Speaker 1: and Methodist ministers from like Ohio. New York City, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: was a lot of working class, immigrant, Black, and Catholic
Speaker 1: neighborhoods constantly evolving. These New Yorkers weren't exactly interested in
Speaker 1: test driving someone else's moral spearmint and turning the city
Speaker 1: dry as a kale chip, But when a band hit
Speaker 1: the whole country, they had no choice. The entire commercial
Speaker 1: beer supply in New York City, from the warehouses to
Speaker 1: the grocery stores to the cabinets of every legitimate business,
Speaker 1: got poured down the drain. But you might be surprised
Speaker 1: to hear despite all that beer, saying goodbye New York
Speaker 1: nightlife wasn't changing. The alcohol fueling it, however, was with
Speaker 1: the beer taps, dry saloons were now serving stiffer and
Speaker 1: more mysterious concoctions, this time with distilled liquor.
Speaker 4: As the amendment is circulating and moving forward to when
Speaker 4: it actually goes into place around New York City, people
Speaker 4: are starting to prepare for it by making sure they
Speaker 4: have their own little home stills or backyard stills or
Speaker 4: you know what people used to call beathtub jent. Even
Speaker 4: if they can't get it legally. They want those systems
Speaker 4: in place. And they were using wood or other materials
Speaker 4: that they could easily access in an urban area, and
Speaker 4: they were making wood alcohol.
Speaker 1: Wood alcohol known to those of us who passed tenth
Speaker 1: grade chemistry as methyl alcohol. It was used as a
Speaker 1: solvent to make varnish and as a fuel, and unfortunately,
Speaker 1: sometimes to mix cocktails. From the taste, you couldn't tell
Speaker 1: exactly what was in those drinks, but you might find
Speaker 1: out the next day when you woke up in the hospital.
Speaker 1: Your body loaded with methyl alcohol, a very toxic substance,
Speaker 1: and that's if you were lucky enough to wake up.
Speaker 1: More and more people from all parts of the city
Speaker 1: were ending up on a gurney outside Gettler's lab.
Speaker 4: Bellevue was this sort of gothic brick building on the
Speaker 4: sort of mid to lower East side of Manhattan. There
Speaker 4: was something about that brick ivy gothic look of the place.
Speaker 4: There was something about, you know, the fact that so
Speaker 4: many deaths occurred there. It had a kind of mythology
Speaker 4: about it. For a number of reasons. Right, they saved
Speaker 4: a lot of lives, but a lot of people died there.
Speaker 4: That it just had this kind of reputation of being
Speaker 4: a slightly haunted place.
Speaker 1: In nineteen nineteen, Bellevue just opened a new pathology building
Speaker 1: six stories high made of solid granite with long arched windows.
Speaker 1: Inside is the city Morgue and the medical examiner's offices.
Speaker 1: There are autopsy rooms and a forensic chemistry laboratory for
Speaker 1: Charles Norris and Alexander Getler to study the dead. Gettler's
Speaker 1: laboratory is a layer of blue flames leaking out of
Speaker 1: bunsen burners, hissing heating systems, boiling dishes. The wood floorboards
Speaker 1: are discolored by chemicals and burns. When Noris and Gettler
Speaker 1: see a rise in cases of people who've been crippled
Speaker 1: by blindness just before death, they have a hunch that
Speaker 1: the reason is poisoning due to toxic liquor wood alcohol.
Speaker 1: But no test exists to detect wood alcohol in cadavers,
Speaker 1: So Getler does what he always does in cases like this,
Speaker 1: He creates one. Gettler's test is grinding up a chunk
Speaker 1: of tissue into a flask and then boiling it into
Speaker 1: a dark sludge. He measures the formaldehyde bubbling out. Most
Speaker 1: alcohol would release just a trace of it. Wood alcohol
Speaker 1: releases an overpowering amount.
Speaker 4: They're really trying to get to the bones of this, right, literally,
Speaker 4: how much poisoned alcohol is out there?
Speaker 1: A fair amount actually. For generations, people had been making
Speaker 1: their own liquor and getting sick doing it. Moonshine, white lightning, liquid, courage,
Speaker 1: call it what you want, but this cheap homemade stuff
Speaker 1: mostly stayed at the margins of American society. Now, however,
Speaker 1: it was becoming the mainstream. So in nineteen eighteen, Gettler
Speaker 1: wrote an article for the country's leading medical journal to
Speaker 1: get word out to doctors and public health officials. He
Speaker 1: saw prohibition coming, and he knew exactly what it would mean.
Speaker 4: He titles this article, would alcohol Poison It? He's not
Speaker 4: messing around. He puts the word poison right in the
Speaker 4: actual article title. So he says, the prohibition by our
Speaker 4: government of the manufacture of distilled liquors will unquestionably lead
Speaker 4: to much moonshining, adulteration, and dilution of the liquors offered
Speaker 4: to the public.
Speaker 7: It is quite evidence given the recent poisonings in the
Speaker 7: city of over thirty persons, six of whom died with
Speaker 7: a whiskey sold in the poor sections of the city
Speaker 7: that's on analysis, was believed to contain a considerable amount
Speaker 7: of wood methyl alcohol. What alcohol pastes like ethyl alcohol
Speaker 7: and morova. It is considerably cheap. Hence the adulterate buys
Speaker 7: the latter ignorant. That's a via poisoning, blindness and often
Speaker 7: death lurks with it.
Speaker 4: He's saying to doctors around the country, you know, let
Speaker 4: people know this is dangerous, this is coming, and arm yourself.
Speaker 4: He said, I want to send up a signal flayer.
Speaker 4: Please take this as a warning. Where at the very
Speaker 4: start of this, essentially what that piece says, in a
Speaker 4: beautifully scientific way, is I'm not talking about alcohol. I'm
Speaker 4: talking about poison.
Speaker 1: Gettler connects the dots. What he sees in nineteen eighteen
Speaker 1: makes him think that people aren't going to be drinking
Speaker 1: less because prohibition is the law of the land. Instead,
Speaker 1: they're going to be drinking a much more suspect, much
Speaker 1: more dangerous supply this message. It didn't land, but he
Speaker 1: was right. By the winter of nineteen nineteen, more than
Speaker 1: sixty New Yorkers died from drinking wood alcohol. Another one
Speaker 1: hundred were blinded then almost that same number of alcohol
Speaker 1: related deaths, only this time just in the month of
Speaker 1: December alone. So Getler sat down at his desk, picked
Speaker 1: up his pen, and tried again.
Speaker 3: The Critical Study of Methods for the Detection of methyl
Speaker 3: alcohol by Alexander O.
Speaker 4: Getler.
Speaker 1: Don't get confused here, wood alcohol, methyl alcohol, and methanol.
Speaker 1: Those are just three different names for the same nasty beast,
Speaker 1: and you should never ever drink it. As Getler's granddaughter
Speaker 1: Dorothy says, says.
Speaker 3: Here, during the years nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen, I
Speaker 3: have had occasion to examine over seven hundred human organs
Speaker 3: for alcohol. In addition to this, about two hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty liquors of various descriptions were analyzed.
Speaker 1: In this report, Getler begins to identify the presence of
Speaker 1: wood alcohol in an alarming number of cases. On the
Speaker 1: day after Christmas in nineteen nineteen, Gettler and Norris switch tactics.
Speaker 1: Just writing for America's doctors wasn't going to save the
Speaker 1: country's direction. Sorry, doctors, I mean, you've been telling us
Speaker 1: it's all diet and exercise for like ever, and we
Speaker 1: just don't listen. So with two major reports reaching too
Speaker 1: small of an audience. Norris and Gettler take this story
Speaker 1: straight to the general public. They called a press conference.
Speaker 1: They invite a throng of reporters from the New York
Speaker 1: papers into their offices in Bellevue. The news hounds file
Speaker 1: in passed broken chairs and over the blood spattered carpet
Speaker 1: left behind by the drunk coroner as a parting gift.
Speaker 1: Then Gettler and Norris deliver their message.
Speaker 2: Anything that passes for whiskey and the saloons is dangerous.
Speaker 2: The first symptom is a mere pain in the stomach,
Speaker 2: but one teaspoon of wood alcohol is enough to cause blackness.
Speaker 2: Drinking a tumble of it will kill you within hours.
Speaker 5: Sure, what does it smell like?
Speaker 1: Complete blindness?
Speaker 2: What's in this booze?
Speaker 5: Have you thought it yourself, doctor Doris?
Speaker 7: Prohibition is not going to make alcohol disappear. It's instead
Speaker 7: going to create numerous substitutes for whiskey that I have dead.
Speaker 4: Before prohibition really takes off. He's looking the federal government
Speaker 4: right in the eye and saying, I want to let
Speaker 4: you know that we're looking at this now, We're seeing
Speaker 4: people starting to die. This is a terrible idea. Whatever
Speaker 4: you know, politics and morality you think is behind what
Speaker 4: you're doing. The bottom line of what you're going to
Speaker 4: do is kill people.
Speaker 1: They issued that warning in December nineteen nineteen. Charles Norris
Speaker 1: and Alexander Getler were now on the case, a case
Speaker 1: that would consume them across the next decade and expose
Speaker 1: the killer of Bis bider Beck, remember him, the jazz
Speaker 1: musician who collapsed in Cleveland at age twenty eight. It
Speaker 1: would take our dynamic duo to the heart of a
Speaker 1: cruel and misguided scheme, a snaffoo that led to the
Speaker 1: mass poisoning of thousands and the people behind it. The
Speaker 1: US government this season on snaffo, the fact.
Speaker 4: That there were only twenty six hundred prohibitionations covering the
Speaker 4: entire Canadian border, of the Mexican border, and both coasts.
Speaker 8: It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4: When we're five years into prohibition, the government is starting
Speaker 4: to go, Okay, this isn't working. What is wrong with
Speaker 4: the American people.
Speaker 7: The bartender took some brass metals and the other two
Speaker 7: patrons held him down and well to beat the crap
Speaker 7: out of him.
Speaker 3: He said, if I ever get out and the two people,
Speaker 3: I'm going to go get the DA and that son
Speaker 3: of a bitch Gettler.
Speaker 5: If I made that up, You've got come on and
Speaker 5: this absolutely all happened.
Speaker 1: Did people die?
Speaker 3: They died.
Speaker 1: Daily Snapfu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment,
Speaker 1: and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio.
Speaker 1: It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo,
Speaker 1: Whitney Donaldson, and Dylan Fagan. Our lead producers are Carl
Speaker 1: Nellis and Alyssa Martino. This episode was written by Albert Chen,
Speaker 1: Carl Nellis and Nevin Callapoly, with additional writing and story
Speaker 1: editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Additional production from
Speaker 1: Stephen wood. Tory Smith is our associate producer. Our story
Speaker 1: editor is nicki Stein. Our production assistants are Nevin Kalapoly
Speaker 1: and a kimminy Ekpo. Fact checking by Charles Richter. Our
Speaker 1: creative executive is Brett Harris. Editing music and sound design
Speaker 1: by Ben Chug Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley
Speaker 1: Andrew Chug is Gilded Audio's creative director. Theme music by
Speaker 1: Dan Rosatto. Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and
Speaker 1: ben Ryizak,